Stirring images of the Mexican Revolution

Some countries are so ancient that their origins are lost in the mists of time. Other nations came of age with the whole world watching their epic convulsions, cameras and recorders in hand.

A new photography exhibition, “A Nation Emerges: The Mexican Revolution Revealed,” organized by the Getty Research Institute at downtown’s Central Library and running through June 3, documents one of the bloodiest and most stirring of these historic rites of passage.

Drawing on the Getty institute’s bulky archival holdings, “A Nation Emerges” traces the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 from its beginnings, when the country chafed under the iron heel of dictator-president Porfirio Díaz, through endless political twists and battlefield turns as the uprising devolved into a brutal civil war among rival factions and shaky alliances (not to mention U.S. military intervention).

By the time the conflict staggered to a conclusion, 1 million people had died in a nation of 12 million, the oligarchy lay in ruins, and the old social order had been upended.

“When you look at the bigger picture, you really think this country really was going through hell,” said Beth Guynn, senior special collections cataloger for the Getty institute, who curated the show of 110 images. “It was a terribly traumatic experience, and I think when you go through a traumatic experience as a nation and as a people, it does make some goals clearer. It does pose the questions you have to face.”

In Mexico, the reckoning didn’t arrive until nearly a century after the Mexican republic was formed, after the 1810-21 war of independence from colonial Spain. In the early 1900s, unresolved ethnic, economic and class tensions erupted in a second struggle more devastating than the first.

The political upheaval dovetailed with an ongoing cultural revolution as photography became both highly accessible and cheap. Some photos in the exhibition — of stern-faced boys posing with their rifles, revolutionary leader Pancho Villa in full gallop and rows of nameless dead after an attack on Mexico City — helped create a lasting visual lexicon of modern combat.

“The case I try to make in the exhibition is that the Mexican Revolution photo-mediated our experience of war,” Guynn said.

Organized both chronologically and by themes, the exhibition is divided into roughly 10 sections, opening toward the end of Díaz’s 35-year rule, the so-called Porfiriato. It depicts events leading to the deposition and execution of President Francisco Madero, which precipitated the revolution’s most violent phase.

And it showcases iconic players such as the rebel commanders Emiliano Zapata and Villa, a master of self-promotion who used photography and other mass media to stage-manage his popular image.

Although a number of the photographers are obscure, others were respected journalists and artists, such as Hugo Brehme, a German who settled in Mexico and worked in both documentary and fine-art photography styles, and Robert Runyon, a prominent border photographer.

Besides photographs, the exhibition also includes amateur postcards and a selection of posters from the L.A. Center for the Study of Political Graphics illustrating how Mexican Revolutionary imagery, especially likenesses of Zapata, have been appropriated for other causes over the decades. Among them is a 2008 poster by L.A. artist Lalo Alcaraz, “Viva Obama,” depicting the future U.S. president sporting a rifle, cartridge belt and sombrero.

“A Nation Emerges” coincides with many other recent cultural activities on both sides of the border marking the revolution’s centennial. Those commemorations have had a bittersweet edge, because of the drug-related violence that has ravaged Mexico since 2006.

The turmoil underlines how the meaning of modern Mexico is being contested, a century after its revolution began, Guynn suggested. “It’s always in the process of defining and refining what it is in some ways,” she said.

reed.johnson@latimes.com